The Rogovoy Report 5.22.23

From around the corner to around the globe...

May 21, 2023

You are receiving this email newsletter because you are subscribed to The Rogovoy Report, a twice-weekly digest of news and cultural happenings, mostly in the greater Berkshires and Hudson Valley region. You may also receive Everything Is Broken, a once-weekly, sibling e-newsletter featuring original writing by yours truly. Thank you so very much for your interest and support.

I will be on vacation for the next few weeks, so The Rogovoy Report will pause until early June. I’ll “see you” back here in a few weeks.

REQUIRED READING

Martin Amis Was Mick Jagger in Literary Form

(The Guardian) by Geoff Dyer - I suspect it’s difficult for anyone under the age of … what? 30? 40? – to comprehend the thrall Martin Amis exerted on writers now in their 50s or above. One might have to insert a qualifying “male” here. Or go the other way, stop generalizing and say how thoroughly he had me in his thrall throughout the 1980s and 90s. There were writers I admired more but he was more fun to read than all of them put together. I sat there aghast at his transformative impact on language.

Williamstown Native Elizabeth Graver’s New Novel Is a Love Song to Family, Community and Home

(Berkshire Eagle) WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Author Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, “Kantika,” is a fictionalized version of her Sephardic maternal grandmother’s journey across four countries, from Constantinople to America, using real photographs and family names. Graver, a native of Williamstown, wrote in an email she interned for the Berkshire Eagle and Berkshires Week during the summer of 1984 and wrote pieces, in high school, that appeared in the North Adams Transcript. A professor of English at Boston College, her fourth book, “The End of the Point,” was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in fiction. “Kantika,” which means song in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), is a beautifully written story of loss and love, of survival and sanctuary, of a search for home and identity. At its heart, it is a story of family.

‘Big Swiss’ by Hudson’s Jen Beagin Is a Fluffy Sex Comedy with a Dark Underbelly

(The Guardian) - Big Swiss is set in Hudson, New York, a small town full of city people who have moved to the countryside to start new lives. The typical Hudsonite’s story is: “I was a corporate lawyer in the city for years, and then I moved to Hudson and became a flower farmer/doll maker/antiques dealer/chef/arborist/alcoholic, and I never looked back.” Narrator Greta works as an audio transcriber for a sex therapist who employs new agey methods such as gong baths and calls himself Om; as he tells Greta, “Everything in Hudson is a little on-the-nose.” Big Swiss is a fluffy sex comedy with a dark underbelly. In fact, its dark underbelly has a darker underbelly, which is then startlingly fluffy.

NEWS FROM THE BERKSHIRES

Swastika Found on Bathroom Stall at Monument Mountain Regional High School Sparks Investigation

(Berkshire Eagle) GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. - A swastika was found penned in a bathroom stall Thursday along with antisemitic language in a boys bathroom at Monument Mountain Regional High School. It was the second case of hate speech affecting the school community within recent days. Last week, a “racist and body shaming screenshot” was found on Snapchat, according to Monument Mountain Principal Kristina Farina. “I am sorry to report that today, we had another hateful image shared in school,” Farina wrote in an email to the school community. “This image was then photographed and shared.”

NEWS FROM THE HUDSON VALLEY

Where in the World Is Antonio Delgado?

(ATU) ALBANY, N.Y. - The state budget was nearly a month late. The governor had gone days without addressing the public. And Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado was onstage at Herkimer Community College alongside the institution’s president and a stuffed, slumped diamond miner in full costume. It was nearly a year ago that Delgado left Congress to become lieutenant governor, forgoing what was expected to be a bruising congressional campaign to become Gov. Kathy Hochul’s wing man. But after campaigning alongside her to win a full four-year term, he has been relatively absent during the governor’s biggest political fights since the election: the failed nomination of Justice Hector D. LaSalle as chief judge; an unprecedented (and now failed) proposal to increase housing; and recent changes to the state’s bail laws intended to increase public safety.

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